I won’t name names here – mostly because politicians are all the same anyway.

But I recently heard one griping about Christianity.

When they announced they were running, conservative newspapers dug up everything they could on this would-be socialist leader, misinterpreting things and criticising them for mistakes made years ago.

The pollie didn’t like this. They said this was so typical of Christian morality, lacking any integrity or forgiveness.

Let that sink in.

An adult from a Western country said that Christian morality is bad at forgiveness.

I don’t expect a commie parasite to read the Bible, but come on.

They almost had me agreeing with them. Liberal or conservative, I think it’s woeful the way journalists distort the truth and dig up ancient history to make their readers feel good. The media doesn’t inform – they entertain, through fear and anger.

People grow, change and learn. I’m not saying their early life is irrelevant, but there has to be room for folks who make mistakes. There has to be room for forgiveness. If not, then what did Christ die for?

Besides, it’s pointless – anyone running on a socialist platform will say something ridiculous soon enough. The conservative media can obsess over that instead.

But the problem with conservative media isn’t that it’s too Christian. The problem is they’re not Christian enough. They talk a big game about Jesus but don’t live up to His teachings.

Besides, if following Christ makes you treat politicians unfairly, then what excuse do the commie journos have for doing the same to conservatives?

Ignorance and hypocrisy – two classic symptoms of Failures of Sentience.

If every journalist and politician read, reread and applied Your Story Isn’t About You, the discourse would look a lot different.

Oh well.

At least you can get an advantage over those charmless parasites by downloading Your Story Isn’t About You from my email signature blocks.

Or you can read more about it here first:

https://christianhypnotism.com/ysiay

Seinfeld is the greatest sitcom of all time.

(Hardly a controversial take there.)

And one of the best episodes is when George decides to ignore his instincts and do the opposite.

(Again, I’m not rattling many cages here.)

Every decision he’s ever made has been a mistake. Therefore, he figures, doing the opposite of his instinct has to be the right choice.

Instead of eating tuna on toast and a coffee, he has chicken salad on rye with tea.

Instead of lying to a beautiful woman to impress her, he admits he’s unemployed. Charmed by his honesty, she goes out with him and sets him up with a job interview.

Instead of sucking up to his would-be boss, George goes on a (justified) rant about how said boss has failed the company.  George gets the job.

His instinct is to be selfish, deceitful and cowardly. Just like the rest of us. Doing the opposite makes him stand out.

Can you imagine if everyone did the opposite of their instincts while on social media?

What if instead of getting angry, you stayed calm.

Instead of assuming the worst about someone based on an out-of-context comment, you assumed the best.

Or instead of believing what you read, you questioned it.

When you’re bored and your instinct is to log on “for a moment”, what if you did anything else instead?

Most utopias aren’t realistic. I reckon that one has a chance.

And it’s not just utopias that are easier than they seem. Assuming the best of others? Most of you are woeful at that. I’ve seen how you conduct yourselves. The speed at which you leap to conclusions puts Olympic gymnasts to shame.

Assuming the best of others is more accurate. Most folks have good reasons for what they do. They certainly see themselves as the hero (or innocent victim) of their story, so seeing them like that shows you how they see the world.

That doesn’t mean you have to believe their stories.

Or tolerate bad behaviour, even when you understand the good intention behind it.

But it helps you understand other people.

And the peace of mind it brings is phenomenal. It frees you to ignore, or maybe pity, folks who’d otherwise get your heart raging.

I don’t know. I think plenty of folks out there ae addicted to feeling outraged. They’d hate Your Story Isn’t About You, then. Even the name would put them off.

That’s by design. I thought long about a name that would repel them.

But if you’re strong enough to handle the idea that others can think differently without them being morons?

Well, I’d say you’d get a lot out of reading, rereading and applying Your Story Isn’t About You.

You can find the link in the signature blocks of my emails.

Or you can read more about it here:

https://christianhypnotism.com/ysiay

Well, today’s the ninth. How are those New Year’s Resolutions coming along?

If you made any, I bet they’re not looking so flash right now.

Your diet is harder than you thought, your workout routine is a hassle, your savings aren’t growing quite as you hoped…

You had good intentions and you even put a plan together. That’s not nothing, you know.

But it sure as hades isn’t enough. Even I’ll admit Karl Marx had good intentions, even if his dumb ideas killed millions.

What’s going on, then? Are you just weak, pathetic and undisciplined?

Honestly, that’s possible.

But it’s not likely.

Let’s take a peek at your resolutions, shall we? Maybe if I lay them all out if front of you, you’ll spot the problem.

I want to get in shape.

This year, I’m going to exercise every day.

I want more freedom and joy in 2024.

I’m going to save more and spend less.

The world will see my creative spirit.

I’m going to put me first.

It’s time to go back to school so I can win my dream job.

Do you see the problem yet?

It’s all me, me, me. No wonder you’re struggling! Despite what folks will tell you, people aren’t inherently selfish. When you work solely for your own benefit, it’s hard to stay motivated.

Remember – Your Story Isn’t About You. It’s about the people in your life.

How about getting in shape so your girlfriend likes to look at you?

Or you’ll go back to school so you can inspire and provide for your kids?

Or you’ll finally record that album because the people who suffer as you suffered need to know they’re not alone?

Focus on other people. You’ll find your motivation soon enough.

On that topic…

The best way to focus on others is to get out of your own head. When you put your blinders to the side and really listen, people will surprise you.

In some ways, that’s not so easy.

Then again, it’s more about what you don’t do rather than what you do.

See what I mean when you read, reread and apply Your Story Isn’t About You.

Download it from my email signature block – or read more about it here:

https://christianhypnotism.com/ysiay

I like The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. It’s an unhinged, primitive scifi story from the mid-’60s about the lunar colonies fighting a revolution for independence from Earth.

It’s an extremely unsubtle allegory to the American Revolution, only with more space travel and libertarians.

The secret to the Moon’s successful revolt is Mycroft, a supercomputer that calculates ship trajectories to and from the Moon. It suddenly becomes self-aware, although only a few folks know it. Those folks decide having a sentient supercomputer on their side could help them win their freedom. The revolution flows from there.

Mycroft isn’t just an intelligent computer – he’s superhuman. He can fake voice and video in real time – including imitating someone so well his husband couldn’t spot the forgery. He’s a better politician than politicians, a better poet than any mere human poet, better able to analyse trends and psychology…

He is an existential threat. He’s the main character – not of the story, but of every story that could ever follow. A machine that much more intelligent makes humanity obsolete – a pitiable side character in the adventures of life.

It’d be hard to write a satisfying end to a story like that.

Heinlein goes for the simplest option – at the end of the revolutionary war, Mycroft dies. It’s not clear whether he’s irreparably broken or the trauma makes him withdraw from human contact.

Either way, he’s out of the story.

Humanity continues to evolve on its own, without interference from this machine god.

What a stroke of luck. Life under an AI who knows you, can imitate you and can manipulate entire societies doesn’t sound fun.

But that was written in the 1960s.

It’s not like that’s suddenly topical or anything…

I know sarcasm doesn’t translate well through text. Remember that before you come at me for that line.

Technology is great and I’m no luddite. But the promise of every other advance has been it’ll free us up to do more of the creative work. So what damn fool invented a machine capable of doing the creative work?

“AI isn’t creative. It’s just algorithms! It just remixes what already exists!” What do you think human creativity is? And whether it’s tEcHnIcAlLy creative or not, it can do creative work. “Not well!” Oh, thank goodness AI capabilities have peaked and no one will ever improve on what we have.

(That was some more sarcasm in that last line.)

Anyway, you’re not here for lukewarm takes on AI.

So let’s narrow in on something here.

Maybe AI will one day be able to truly empathise with us. Even if it can’t, it can already pretend well enough for you to think of it as a friend, even a lover.

That doesn’t bode well for a society already addicted to social media. Folks prefer the synthetic and diluted social experience, even when it makes them feel like manure.

Who is going to prefer your company over a machine’s? Especially if that machine can give them everything they think they want – kindness, understanding, compliments, validation…

Well, there’s still no replacing the real thing. Not yet. A deep chat with a loved one nourishes you in ways that aren’t easy to explain.

But that’s only true if you’re able to have a deep and meaningful talk.

That doesn’t require living an interesting life or reading up on philosophy. Some folks who do that are annoying and pretentious.

All it takes is an open heart and an open ear.

You might surprise yourself with how easy that is to learn.

All you have to do is read, reread and apply Your Story Isn’t About You.

You can download it from my email signature block – or read more about it here:

https://christianhypnotism.com/ysiay

Here’s a simple game to play. If you neglect basic empathy and reasoning, then this will likely cause quite a few paradigm shifts for you.

This is how you play:

(1) Read, reread and apply Your Story Isn’t About You.

(2) Using these skills, examine your core political, religious and social beliefs. Ask yourself how a smart, well-informed and compassionate person would disagree with you.

(3) Savour the feeling of wriggling closer to the truth.

This can be confronting. This can shake many of your beliefs about the world.

It’ll make you calmer, wiser and more forgiving.

And the beliefs you keep? Well, you’ll only appreciate them more.

This won’t get you to the absolute heart of everything, but it will get you closer to the truth. And that’s not nothing.

For anyone who’s switched on, they’ll see that as quite the prize indeed.

Folks like that will want to read, reread and apply Your Story Isn’t About You. They can download it from the link in my signature block – or they can read more here:

https://christianhypnotism.com/ysiay

I’ve read up on some of the neuroscience of ageing.

(So you don’t have to.)

Keeping your brain healthy – there are plenty of claims out there on how to do it.

Research like this is always difficult to do and difficult to read.

But…

When the research and common sense align, it’s safe to guess you’re at least on the right track there.

Common sense – filtered through the antifragile idea of you should use your brain as it evolved to be used – tells us the following activities are great for the health of your ol’ clump of neurons:

• Dancing, especially social dancing, because it combines so many useful skills. Physical movement, connection with another person, listening, anticipating, creating, celebrating beauty…
• Walking on uneven ground, like a cobblestone road. Maintaining your balance is excellent exercise for your brain.
• Turning off your GPS and navigating to somewhere new. Memorise landmarks and visualise where you are in space. Use maps, sure, but don’t use maps that tell you where you are.

And…

The body works on a use it or lose it principle. Use your muscles or lose them. Use your creativity or lose it.

And use your sentience or lose it.

If you don’t practice seeing things as other people see them, then you lose that ability. And have you been on Facebarf or SickTok lately? There’s a real dearth of that going on. If you say that She-Hulk was badly written, you’ll get folks lecturing you about why you’re wrong about gay marriage. They have one scrap of data about you and so they think they know everything about you.

It’d be hilarious if it weren’t so tedious.

And I’m sure this is creating fundamental social problems. Between the solitary confinement of the lockdown years and now the insane psychology experiment of social media, folks are forgetting how to talk to each other.

That ain’t good and it ain’t normal.

But at least you can protect yourself from this trap.

Your Story Isn’t About You doesn’t teach you social skills. What it teaches is far more fundamental than that – the lost art of seeing the world as others see it.

It’s something humans naturally excel at.

We also naturally excel at persistence hunting but, without practice, we lose that ability.

That’s good news to anyone who practices it – it gives you an easy edge over those who don’t.

Practice it when you download Your Story Isn’t About You from my email signature block. Sign up or read more about it here:

https://christianhypnotism.com/ysiay

Philosophy – like physics – is complex.

So when a simple idea can penetrate the cloud of jargon and analysis, it spreads liked a planned pandemic.

In physics, things like The Big Bang and E = mc^2 escaped the cloistered halls of academia and caught on.  Most folks who can tell you what E famously equals can’t tell you what that equation means, but that’s okay. It’s a lot simpler and catchier than, say, the Maxwell equations.

Similar things happen with philosophy. A classic example is Descartes’ ol’ expression:

I think, therefore I am.

It’s simple enough to remember. It’s also simple enough to understand. Unlike with Einstein’s famous equation, I think most folks get what ITTIA suggests:

You might not be sure of much.

The world might be a big bundle of lies and illusions that we misinterpret.

But at least, even if you know nothing else, you know that you exist. If you didn’t exist, there’d be no one there to wonder about it.

It’s a simple idea, so easy to understand.

And what a shame that is, given how wrong it is – and how bad it is for you.

How is it wrong? Surely something as simple as ITTIA is self-evident? No, because how do you know that you exist? I think is proof that something exists, but that something might not be you. The thing that thinks it’s you might be a drug-addled monkey’s hallucinations, garbage output from a galactic supercomputer or a swarm of particles sparking off each other at random.

I exist is an assumption – and a reasonable one.

But you can’t question everything else but leave that standing. It’s a ridiculous oversight.

Now, how it’s bad for you:

The four pillars of philosophy are logic (how consistent and coherent ideas are), epistemology (how we know what we know), ethics (what is good and what is bad) and aesthetics (what’s beautiful, appealing and desirable).

As an Anglican preacher pointed out to me recently, ITTIA eliminates the pillar of aesthetics. If nothing outside of you is real, then beauty is entirely subjective. People see beauty in things that are almost but not perfectly symmetric (think of Marilyn Monroe’s mole, which only made her more beautiful) – it’s culturally universal, hardwired into the human brain – but, hey, maybe that’s just, like, an opinion, man.

Beauty has objective rules. That’s what aesthetics studies. But  

The preacher didn’t go far enough. ITTIA undermines epistemology, because how can we know what we know when we can’t trust anything but our own thoughts? It certainly undermines ethics. Good and bad lose their meaning when you can’t even be sure that other people are even real.

At least ITTIA doesn’t necessarily undermine logic. It just fails the logical tests of coherency and consistency, but it doesn’t destroy logic itself.

But that’s still three out of four pillars of philosophy cast into the dirt.

If you’re wondering why the modern West is so insane at times, this is a big part of part of it.

Aesthetic relativity is how a fat woman with a shaved head, permanent scowl and neck tattoos can look you in the eye and tell you she’s beautiful – no, she’s perfect.

It’s how a billion-dollar company can build a new HQ so hideous it makes your eyes bleed, while poor and illiterate peasants used to make even their post offices gorgeous and timeless.

It’s why so much art these days is about sensory pleasure – think action movies, romcoms and simple dramas – whereas art used to be a spiritual connection to something transcendent and sublime.

Compare modern sculptures to medieval ones and you’ll see we’ve lost something special.

And that’s just aesthetic relativism.

Moral relativism is how you decide you can exploit the vulnerable, treat the dying as burdens, kill your own baby, call yourself whatever gender you want and destroy the natural environment, so long as it makes you happy. Truth, beauty and society be damned – all that matters is how you feel. Everything else is secondary. Of course that all is – after all, those other things might not even exist, so why sweat it?

It’s pure selfishness, to the point of writing off everything else as worse than irrelevant.

Given the choice between creating a legacy and mindlessly consuming, only a moral relativist would get that wrong.

“Are you blaming Descartes for problems that didn’t appear until centuries after his death?”

I surely am – and with good reason. People might have echoes and parroted ITTIA to each other, but society was still Christian at heart. They might have said the words, they might have even intellectually agreed with them but – at their spiritual and emotional core, which held onto Christian values – they collectively rejected Descartes.

Christianity teaches you that not only is the world real, it (and the people living here) matter so much that God was willing to live as a human, suffer every mortal indignity and then die a painful death to save us.

The world doesn’t just exist in the Christian viewpoint – it’s incredibly precious. God sacrificed Himself to protect it.

Believe that, hold that in your heart, and ITTIA becomes just a bunch of words.

But they’re sticky words. They’re easy to remember, repeat and understand, even if you don’t fully live by them.

That means they stuck around, dormant, like a virus suppressed by a healthy immune system.

All it took for that vile philosophy to rise was for the West to turn its back on Christianity. Treat the Bible as a bunch of obsolete fairy tales from bigoted shepherds and suddenly everything it protected you from comes back.

Without Christian values to protect society, we’re sick – and vulnerable to whatever viruses lie within our minds.

But this isn’t me preaching.

This isn’t me telling you to convert to Christianity.

(Although now that I mention it, that’s a great idea.)

No, you don’t need to be a Christian to enjoy Christian values. Every generation has had its radicals, heretics, foreigners, doubters, contrarians and the overly pragmatic. It doesn’t matter – when society overall has Christian values, you can share those values even if you don’t share the faith that supports them.

That, essentially, is what Your Story Isn’t About You teaches.

Even that name is a wholesome inversion of ITTIA – a reminder to think of others more than you think of yourself.

And to think like them, too.

Not to mindlessly mimic those around you, but to understand them. In fact, you’ll be truer to yourself when you really get how and why folks disagree with you.

And it’s not about martyrdom, denying your own desires or experiences to appease others. In fact, you’ll get a lot more of what you want in life if you understand how others think. Dating, sales, friendship, marriage, community – all of the important things come from understanding other people, whether you agree with them or not.

Your Story Isn’t About You, but that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy it.

Whether you’re Christian or not – even if you’re a full-blown militant atheist – you’ll get a lot out of reading, rereading and applying this.

Download it from the signature block of my emails, or read more about it here:

https://christianhypnotism.com/ysiay

I recently attended a music festival. It was nice to escape the usual pulse of life and lose myself in excellent songwork for a while.

If it’s been a while since your last heavy dose of live music, consider fixing that.

There was a lot of dancing, of course – good dancing, bad dancing, enthusiastic dancing…

(All of that from me.)

And among the bopping and the bouncing people, many of the daytime music had toddlers dancing along.

I say dancing along. They were definitely dancing, but I don’t know what it was along to. They’d run their little legs back and forth, chasing each other before jumping up and down.

If they ever matched the rhythm of the song, it was by luck – and it didn’t last long.

Adults are different. I mean, generally. There was one woman who tried to clap along to some music. She wasn’t clapping on the beat and she wasn’t even clapping on the off-beat. She was just… I don’t know.

But apart from a few weirdos like that, even bad adult dancers were able to bop or shuffle in-time.

Sometime between being a toddler and being an adult, most of us learn to feel the music. It’s so common you might not even think about what that means. Music is sound – you hear it. Sure, with enough bass and volume it’ll rattle your teeth, but you can feel the beat to any music.

You take in sound and you feel something physical in your body.

Appreciate that! Synesthesia – where one set of sensations triggers another unrelated set – is something you learn. Toddlers can hear the music and they try to dance to it, but they can’t feel it yet. Even musically illiterate adults can do it without thinking.

It’s a skill you learn without even meaning to.

That’s not the only one.

You’re not born with the ability to see things through the eyes of others. In fact, you learn to speak before you learn theory of mind, so psychologists can test how it develops.

Like so many abilities, it develops unevenly. Some learn it fast or well, while others take their time or learn it poorly.

Until they learn it, though, they’re missing a key element of sentience. Sentience isn’t just intelligence, although that’s key as well. No, self-awareness requires you to remember that others are self-aware too – and in different ways.

Which means – like the woman clapping along so out of rhythm it was almost painful – some folks are just less self-aware.

Failures of Sentience cost you. They undermine relationships, from your spouse and siblings to the idiots arguing with you online, every interaction you have is worse when you can’t see things as others do.

Everything from your peace of mind to your career success hinge on this one fundamental ability.

That’s the bad news.

The good news?

Like any skill, you can train and develop this.

And like any skill, going from poor to good is surprisingly easy.

A little bit of the right sort of practice can change everything.

And you can begin practising immediately by reading, rereading and applying Your Story Isn’t About You. You can download that from the signature block of any of my emails – or you can read more about it here:

https://christianhypnotism.com/ysiay